The Mosquito

by Timothy C. Winegard

  Following First Bull Run, McClellan dithered for almost a year, allowing the Confederacy to organize a war economy as best it could, mobilize its military resources, and dig in. Aware of an impending assault on Richmond, both Davis and Lee authorized the transfer of troops from the Deep South to Richmond, knowing that mosquito season would prevent Union operations in this southern theater while sparing their own troops from disease. “At this season I think it impossible for the enemy to make any expedition into the interior,” wrote Lee. “The troops that you retain there will suffer more from disease than the enemy.” President Davis added that “decisive operations are pending here in this section, and the climate already restrains operations on the coast.” Davis stressed that these reinforcements come only “from positions where the season will prevent active operations.” Lee’s Confederate Army of roughly 100,000, burrowed in around Richmond, was ready for McClellan’s Union Peninsula Campaign. The next generations of Yorktown’s drooling history-making mosquitoes, whose ancestors had fed on the British eighty years earlier, were now flying in wait for McClellan’s men.

  McClellan was an overly obsessive planner, lacked an aggressive military mind, habitually overestimated enemy strengths, and was apprehensive that defeat or any considerable loss of troops under his command would damage and weaken his designs on the presidency. A frustrated Lincoln and the scathing media clamored for action. McClellan eventually bowed to mounting pressure and began his much-anticipated strike on Richmond in March 1862. “Little Mac” channeled 120,000 men up the peninsula between the now familiar York and James Rivers riven by creeks and swamps—ideal mosquito festival grounds. Having disembarked his numerically superior force, instead of seizing the initiative, the blundering McClellan employed his favored military pastime of hurry up and wait.

  Following the Union capture of Yorktown in mid-April, McClellan’s nervous jitters, plus a stiff Confederate delaying action, ground the Union advance to a slow crawl among the rising rivers and swamps created by the spring thaw and April showers. A Union soldier testified to being assailed by “an army of Virginia mosquitoes. . . . They were the largest specimens I ever saw and the most blood-thirsty as well.” Another complained of being probed by “squads of full-grown mosquitoes.” Union surgeon Dr. Alfred Castleman commented, “Everything soaked in rain, chilly, and cheerless. But we are gradually becoming amphibious.” Over the next two months, Union forces advanced a mere thirty miles through the Jamestown/Yorktown mosquito colonies. Dr. Castleman summed up the disease environment: “Sickness among the troops rapidly increasing. Remittent fever, diarrhea, and dysentery prevail.” Malaria and dysentery were by far the most crippling diseases of the war.

  As Union forces crept toward Richmond, malarial sickness began to increase, adding to escalating battle casualties. By the end of May, with his army at the city gates, McClellan was deliriously ill and bedridden with malaria. By this time, 26% of the Union Army was too sick to fight. During his malarial absence, partitioned Union columns floundered in an area the Confederates called the “pestilent marshes of the Peninsula.” Union command structure broke down and supplies of quinine were left in the rear to allow for the forward movement of ammunition, artillery, and other supplies. Malaria and dysentery continued their upsurge into June and July.

  Confederate soldier John Beall understood the perils of the Union position. “McClellan now encamped . . . being exposed to the malarious and miasmatic winds,” he reported home. “His army, with its strength shattered by fatigue, hunger, excitement, and dispirited by defeat, must fall by thousands before fevers and sickness.” McClellan’s weakened army could not crack Richmond’s defensive perimeter and in late June, Lee launched fierce counterattacks that drove Union forces into a headlong retreat back to the coast. The Union ineffective sick list had reached 40% of their total manpower. “The subtle malaria of the rebel soil,” confessed Union surgeon Edwin Bidwell, “destroys and disables more Northern soldiers than all the wounds received from rebel arms.” Confederate forces were positioned on higher ground and away from the marshes and mosquitoes. While malaria did diminish southern strength, sickness in the Confederate ranks during the campaign was considerably lower, fluctuating between 10% and 15%.

  McClellan’s subordinate, Brigadier General Erasmus Keyes, wrote to Lincoln urging the president to withhold reinforcements and extract the army entirely: “To bring troops freshly raised at the North to the country in the months of July, August, and September would be to cast our resources to the sea. The raw troops would melt away and be ruined forever.” Although McClellan was begging for reinforcements for another crack at Richmond, he was bluntly told to evacuate the mosquito-plagued peninsula because “to keep your army in its present position until it could be so re-enforced would almost destroy it in that climate. The months of August and September are almost fatal to whites who live on that part of the James River.” Just as they had forced the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia’s malarious mosquitoes helped prolong the Civil War by aiding in McClellan’s embarrassing failure to capture the capital of Richmond. “The high rate of malaria during the Peninsular Campaign helped expedite the Army of the Potomac’s retreat to Washington,” reiterates Bell. “McClellan’s defeat, in part attributable to disease, triggered a sea change in the North’s approach to the war; afterwards it would work to destroy slavery and create a new birth of freedom rather than fight exclusively to preserve the old republic.” Harassed by mosquitoes, McClellan failed to deliver Lincoln a victory in the east. Meanwhile, his mosquito-hounded commanders in the west did not deliver, either.

  While the malarious mosquito was melting McClellan’s army in Virginia, she also prolonged the war in the west by rebuffing the Union’s first attempt to take the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi, between May and July 1862. She also contributed to the decision not to march on Vicksburg from the north after the Union victory at Corinth in northern Mississippi in May 1862. Having maneuvered the Confederate Army under Beauregard out of Corinth, roughly ninety miles due east of Memphis, Union commander General Henry Halleck was wary of pursuing him south of Scott’s “Memphis Line” at the onset of yellow fever and malaria season. He rightly believed that a southern advance toward Vicksburg would be suicide by mosquito. “If we follow the enemy into the swamps of Mississippi,” he reported to his political masters in Washington, “there can be no doubt that our army will be disabled by disease.” His army was already thinning from the tag team of malaria and dysentery. While laid up with malaria, Major General William Tecumseh Sherman, not yet a household name, alerted his superiors that only half of his 10,000 soldiers were fit for duty. Prior to retreating south to fight another day, Beauregard reported that roughly 15% of his men were suffering from malaria. General Halleck stayed put, refusing to give chase for fear of mosquito-borne disease.

  Instead, it was Admiral David Farragut who led his men into the malarial trap plotted and prepared by the mosquitoes of Vicksburg. Having captured New Orleans in April 1862, Farragut was ordered to proceed north along the Mississippi. As a communications, supply, and transportation hub, Vicksburg was too important for the Union to pass over and ignore. “Vicksburg,” proclaimed Jefferson Davis, “is the nail head that holds the South’s two halves together.”

  Farragut made a halfhearted aborted attempt to capture Vicksburg, or the “Gibraltar of the West,” in May. Because Vicksburg was the last Confederate stronghold on the Mississippi, Lincoln and his military strategists were frustrated with Farragut’s lackluster effort and were restless to secure source-to-mouth control of the river to entirely cut the Confederate lifeline. Farragut was ordered to renew the Vicksburg offensive in late June with a combined fleet of 3,000 soldiers. “Awaiting them were ten thousand Confederates,” Bell weighs in, “and an untold number of anopheles mosquitoes. Both proved to be lethal deterrents.” The fortress city of Vicksburg is situated on a high bluff on a peninsula at a horseshoe-shaped bend in the easter
n shore of the river, surrounded by clusters of untamed and interspersed swamps and backwater channels. There was no viable access to the towering city aside from the fronting river. The geography prevented Farragut from pressing his naval superiority or landing troops. As a solution, he attempted to dig a canal across the neck of the peninsula to bypass the fortified cliffs. Everything he tried was repulsed by mosquitoes.

  Union troops, reported Brigadier General Thomas Williams from Vicksburg, were “yet so affected by malaria as to be good for nothing.” When Farragut finally abandoned his operation in late July, 75% of the troops under his command were either dead or hospitalized by mosquito-borne disease. “The only course now to be pursued,” it was suggested, “is to yield to the climate and postpone any further action at Vicksburg till the fever season is over.” Confederate commander General Edmund Kirby Smith concurred. “The enemy will, I think, attempt no invasion of Mississippi or Alabama this summer,” Smith advised his superior, General Braxton Bragg. “The character of the country, the climate . . . are insurmountable obstacles.” With McClellan’s simultaneous mosquito-chased retreat from Richmond, the Confederate states were winning their war of independence.

  Considering the 1862 humiliations in Virginia and at Vicksburg, Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, an early advocate of enlisting African Americans, said aloud what most other Union politicians and military minds were already thinking. “We cannot maintain the contest with the disadvantages of unacclimated troops and distant supplies against an enemy enabled to bring one-half the population under arms with the other half held in labor, with no cost except that of bare subsistence for the armed moiety.” Although Chase was instrumental in securing the phrase “In God We Trust” on American currency in 1864, during the Civil War, God was on the side of the biggest and best quinine-supplied battalions. The mosquito, in concert with morality and manpower considerations, unseated and deposed the established cultural, racial, and legal conventions of the United States by scripting the environment for the Emancipation Proclamation with its promise of a new birth of freedom for African Americans kept and guaranteed by General Ulysses S. Grant.

  Collectively, the Union defeats during the spring and summer of 1862 upended Union strategy. Lincoln and his advisors agreed on a new way forward—the complete annihilation of Confederate armies and a policy of starvation-enforced capitulation of the entire southern war effort and economy through the eradication of slavery. “Those who deny freedom to others,” remarked Lincoln, “deserve it not for themselves.” The losses and mosquito-induced military blunders of 1862, argues Bell, “helped convince the Lincoln administration that only the complete subjugation of the South, including the dismantling of slavery, would restore the Union and bring peace.” Charles Mann agrees that malaria “delayed the Union victory by months or even years. In the long run this may be worth celebrating. Initially the North proclaimed that its goal was to preserve the nation, not free slaves. . . . The longer the war ground on, the more willing grew Washington to consider radical measures.” Given the role of the mosquito in prolonging the grinding conflict, he reckons that “part of the credit for the Emancipation Proclamation be assigned to malaria.” Following the first Union victory (or more accurately a draw) at the meat-grinding Battle of Antietam in September 1862, Lincoln forever altered the direction of the war and the nation itself by drafting his most celebrated and enduring executive order.*

  On January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation legally liberated (at least on paper) roughly 3.5 million enslaved African Americans in select areas of the Confederacy, specifically those states still in rebellion.* It also officially sanctioned and authorized the enlistment of African Americans to fight in a war that Lincoln whispered “was in some way about slavery.” While the impetus for Lincoln’s deliverance of the Confederate slave population was a moral one, it was also directly coupled to military pragmatism. As argued by Chase, freed acclimated slaves would strengthen Union numbers, while at the same time depriving the Confederacy of its workforce.

  Although this component of the Emancipation Proclamation is generally overlooked, the decree was correspondingly designed as a military measure to reduce Confederate labor, forcing the reassignment of frontline fighting troops to the fields and factories. “The president’s decision to emancipate slaves and arm them for the purpose of killing their former masters represented a radical departure from his earlier policies,” acknowledges Bell. “The military reversals of 1862, however, convinced Lincoln that emancipation and black enlistment were military necessities. Both policies strengthened northern forces while robbing the Confederacy of its chief labor force.” Lincoln also shared the belief of medical authorities and advisors that African American soldiers equipped with their impenetrable genetic defenses to mosquito-borne disease would be invaluable to operations in the seething theaters of the Deep South to “hold points on the Mississippi during the sickly season.” According to Surgeon General William A. Hammond, it was a “well-ascertained fact” that Africans were “less liable to the affections of malarious origin than the European.” Of the roughly 200,000 African Americans who eventually served in Union forces, two-thirds had formerly been southern slaves. With their newfound freedom, they enlisted to ensure the emancipation of their captive brethren by fighting on the front lines and battlefields of a war that was now being waged to decide the fate of slavery itself.

  Along with the primary aim of preserving the economic integrity of the Union, the war was now also about expunging and purging slavery, with its windfall of military expediency. “The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the moral atmosphere of the war,” grants distinguished military historian John Keegan. “Thenceforward the war was about slavery.” Without a Union victory, however, the Proclamation was nothing more than a paper tiger. The freedom of over four million people hung in the balance, and they clung to the hope of a Union victory and the unconditional surrender of the Confederacy. Ulysses S. Grant, with the aid of quinine and an allied General Anopheles, delivered, bringing the rousing words of Lincoln’s Proclamation to life and into legal reality.

  Unlike McClellan, who was defeated by Lincoln in the 1864 presidential election, Grant had no political machinations or pretenses and was not afraid to gamble on the battlefield. He was introverted, quiet, awkward, and quirky, but he was also a hard-charger and was willing to sacrifice lives to achieve victory, which earned him the nickname “the Butcher.” His campaign at Vicksburg between May and July 1863 was a bold, brilliant, and successful masterstroke of generalship. In later years, Grant scrutinized and commented on his own performance and war record. In his typical self-disparaging manner, he asserted that all his Civil War campaigns could be enhanced and improved bar one: Vicksburg. During mosquito season, Grant ran the Union fleet past the gauntlet of Vicksburg’s guns, landing his men south of the city. The press maligned his initial movements. Due to mosquito-borne disease, armchair-general newspaper reporters concluded, “The simple substance of it is, that an army of seventy-five thousand men would find their graves between now and the first of October without ever facing an enemy.” General Lee also believed that any Union advance on Vicksburg during the sweltering summer mosquito months was highly improbable.

  But Grant wasn’t worried about second-guessers nor concerned with Lee’s sensible combat estimate. Ulysses S. Grant was a winner, unlike the parade of tripping Union generals before him. “I hope yet to fool the rebels and effect a landing where they do not expect me,” he relayed to his staff officers. And he did just that by severing his own supply lines and marching his army through the backdoor swamps surrounding Vicksburg. With his store ships unable to run the river past Vicksburg’s elevated guns, Grant’s soldiers were forced to live off the land. It was a brilliant stroke of military maneuvering. During his encirclement of the city, he captured several smaller ports as well as the state capital, Jackson.

  As a supporting operation to Grant’s main thrust, a Union d
etachment of 30,000 to 40,000 soldiers, including nine recently mobilized regiments of US Colored Troops composed primarily of emancipated slaves, cordoned Port Hudson, located 20 miles north of Baton Rouge and 150 miles south of the besieged river bastion of Vicksburg. A staunch advocate of enlisting African Americans for military service, Grant reminded Lincoln that “I have given the subject of arming the negro my hearty support. This, with the emancipation of the negro, is the heaviest blow yet given to the Confederacy.” Having squeezed the Confederate fortifications at Vicksburg with a Union line stretching 15 miles and unsettled by two fruitless yet costly frontal assaults on entrenched defenders, Grant initiated his siege on May 25—directly at the onset of mosquito season.

  Grant, however, knew he had an advantage that the depleted and besieged defenders of Vicksburg did not. While he had proven himself willing to leave his rations and supply depots behind, there was no way he was slogging through to muck about the swamps of Mississippi without stockpiles of quinine. One of the most important munitions in the Union’s arsenal was its abundant supply of this antimalarial medication. “The advantage this drug gave to Union forces cannot be overstated,” emphasizes Bell. “In fact,” he says of his own book, “one could argue without too much hyperbole that a more appropriate subtitle for this book might have been ‘How Quinine Saved the North.’ . . . The Confederacy, on the other hand, experienced quinine shortages for most of the war, which meant that malarial fevers among Rebels went unchecked more often than not. Southern civilians also suffered.”